Board communication (was RE: Looking for good souls)

> From: Bert Freudenberg
> Wouldn't the proper way of handling this the [be] board gathering  
> consensus and [...]

It's a little difficult to tell, as the board *still* has no published
way of working, there is (to my knowledge) no formal constitution of the
Squeak Foundation despite it handling donations, and there appears not
even to be any way of agreeing on what the board has done in order to
present it at intervals to the wider community (witness Stef's and
Craig's recent emails).

If I'm wrong on any of these, I'd love to know; but it appears that the
new board is no more functional than the last when it comes to
communication.

                - Peter

On 25.04.2006, at 08:46, Peter Crowther wrote:

Yes, I personally (not speaking for the board) think we have a long
way to go to make it better... the problem is that (at least me  
personally)
start to just not have enough time and energy to get everything done
just now...

I know this is bad, but I don't know how to fix it.

As for communication, I volunteered to write a short report, it should
have been done over the weekend, but it didn't. Sorry.

The main problem is that all this takes a huge huge amount of time and
energy... and there is a dayjob, and doing something else for fun
sometime is important, too.

        Marcus

Hi Peter--

 > It's a little difficult to tell, as the board *still* has no published
 > way of working...

        So far we have discussed open issues on the (private) board mailing
list. We have informally drafted Tim to be the spokesperson, but, as one
can see from this message, at various times different members have
communicated with squeak-dev. We like the idea of having a timeout on
the discussions, so that things actually keep moving.

        I personally have tried to keep open issues from languishing. For
example, when there was a vacuum surrounding who would take over liaison
roles between teams and the board, I just volunteered for all of the
open slots in order to keep things moving (deferring to anyone else who
wanted them).

        I have a relatively large amount of time and energy I can devote to the
Board, by the way.

 > ...there is (to my knowledge) no formal constitution of the Squeak
 > Foundation despite it handling donations...

        Good point, and we are discussing that.

 > ...and there appears not even to be any way of agreeing on what the
 > board has done in order to present it at intervals to the wider
 > community (witness Stef's and Craig's recent emails).

        I think there actually is a consensus on how to do that, but (no
offense, Stef), Stef seems to be a bit trigger-happy.

 > If I'm wrong on any of these, I'd love to know; but it appears that
 > the new board is no more functional than the last when it comes to
 > communication.

        Yes, I think you are wrong. :)


        thanks,

-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

"Formal constitution?"  It's been 3+ years and a quarter-trillion
dollars+ in Iraq and still no formal constitution.

This whining is almost unbearable.  They just formed man, they're
spread all over the world and, to top it off, they're a busy bunch of
people with regular jobs, big-time Squeak projects AND, now, this new
board responsibility.

How about cutting 'em a little slack time to get organized before using
such harsh words, huh?

--- Peter Crowther <[hidden email]> wrote:

> From: Craig Latta
> Hi Peter--

Thanks for the response, Craig.

[Reasoned rebuttal of my points elided in the interests of brevity]

> Yes, I think you are wrong. :)

Thanks for the view from the inside on those.  Sounds like there's
plenty in the pipeline, and I await developments with interest!
Meanwhile, unless anyone wants to wake the dormant elections team and
pass on some work, I'll pipe down re communication and governance
issues.  Much to Chris' (and others') relief, I suspect.

                - Peter

> I think there actually is a consensus on how to do that, but (no  
> offense, Stef), Stef seems to be a bit trigger-happy.

I have some free slots for doing some stuff and after they vanish. So  
indeed I'm pushing fast and far (certainly too).
I think that from a board point of view, I should remove some weights  
on the shoulders of marcus.
the first steps are to spread the knowledge as we started to discuss it.

Stef

Hi members, (and please take no offense)

I was browsing around Wikipedia and accidentally found the strange
expression of "Parkinson's bicycle shed effect". Didn't know what it
means, so I looked for it. Check it out, may be relevant.

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#bikeshed

Attis

Highly relevant indeed, thank you.  I think the best we can do about
this is simply to be aware that the tendency exists and try to monitor
ourselves for it.

Ken

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 23:47 +0200, Nagy Attila wrote:

That's pretty funny!!

Ron

Aha!  That's why the Subversion developers were always talking about
bikesheds on the developer list... :)

Julian

Nagy Attila wrote:

"Nagy Attila" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hi members, (and please take no offense)
>
> I was browsing around Wikipedia and accidentally found the strange
> expression of "Parkinson's bicycle shed effect". Didn't know what it
> means, so I looked for it. Check it out, may be relevant.
>
> http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#bikeshed

The FreeBSD crowd made a t-shirt: "FreeBSD 4:10: Thou shalt not commit
bikesheds".

It's a nice shirt: http://www.bsdmall.com/fourten.html

frank

Absolutely true :-)

Elod